By: The Carver Times Staff
March 5, 2021
Early in the morning, on Monday, February 8, Philadelphia teachers prepared for their first classes of the week. However, instead of logging in from their home offices, kitchen tables, or living rooms, they bundled up and travelled all over the city to teach from the parking lots and front yards of Philadelphia Elementary Schools, protesting the School District of Philadelphia’s mandate for K-2 teachers and students to return to buildings for in-person learning. Though the District has promised rigorous safety measures, Jerry Jordan, Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President, claims that the District has not met the necessary ventilation requirements.
Cynthia Moultrie, a teacher leader at Duckery Elementary School in North Philadelphia stood with her colleagues along Diamond Street Monday morning.
It's so important because we want to show solidarity and as a union we want to be united in terms of what we are asking for. And we're asking all buildings, school buildings to be safe for everyone.
Teachers, like Kristin Jones, who teaches at Carver High School of Engineering and Science, located just blocks from Duckery, showed up in support of their Elementary Colleagues.
"I’m here in support of the K-2 educators that were asked to come back into unsafe buildings" Kristin said. "We need a better plan. We need these buildings to be up to code. We need to figure out how to get funding to get all these buildings safe. This is not just about the Coronavirus, this is about unsafe building conditions, about ventilation, about mold, about asbestos. There's a lot of different health concerns."
These multiple health concerns have fueled community distrust of the District’s promises to keep students and staff safe. Even before the pandemic, thousands of students, teachers, and school staff expressed serious concerns over building conditions.
Past concerns with the School Districts mishandling of health hazards coupled with current concerns about Covid led to this faceoff between the School Board and the teacher’s union. Teachers, like Cynthia, are asking for the board to reconsider its current plan to reopen buildings.
Christina Puntel, a teacher at Carver, hopes "that policymakers at the School District of Philadelphia, and also our mayor, and also all of the council's people and people in elected office that did not sign on for schools like Duckery to open safely, I hope that they see that we are not messing around, that we ride for each other, and that we want our schools to be safe and healthy when we reopen."
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